New Backgrounds
When I started writing The Board, I was quite pragmatic about the appearance of the app. I used my limited Gimp and Inkscape skills to produce the UI theme images and grabbed some free background images from internet.
So, the background images you’ve seen on previous The Board demos are just placeholders. Christian Ankert suggested—on the respective bug report— to use some of the free stock images by Kimberly Crick. Great tip! I produced five beautiful backgrounds based on her stock images: cork, cardboard, green, paper, and fabric. The goal with those backgrounds is to reinforce the physical aspect of the UI. Hence the use of textures mimicking real-world materials instead of abstract stuff.
The UI still needs some love from a real graphic designer but I’m quite happy with this first set of backgrounds. If you want to propose new ones, please submit them to GNOME Bugzilla.
I would also suggest a copybook-style background (i.e. with horizontal and maybe vertical lines) as well as an option to choose a plain single-color background (white ftw!) or maybe simple gradients.
P.S. Great to see your app evolving! For now I just keep reading your news and didn’t actually test your app because all that hacking around to make it run seems complicated to me but I love the idea! Unfortunately there is no really good note-taking software for Linux (IMO).
@Dipish, I agree that the current process to get The Board built and running is complicated and time-consuming for those who just want to give it a try. The good news is that packages for the development versions of Ubuntu (Natty), Fedora (Rawhide), and openSUSE (10.4) are coming soon. Keep an eye on Planet GNOME (or my blog) as I’ll announce the packages as soon as they are available.
I sure will! Subscribed to rss :) But how about Ubuntu 10.04/10.10? Most users use these…
@Dipish, The main issue with having The Board in current stable distro releases (Ubuntu 10.10, Fedora 14, openSUSE 10.3, etc) is that it uses GNOME 3 platform which has been released yet. So, unfortunately, it will only be available on the next distro releases—which are under development at the moment.
[...] Backgrounds in The Board When I started writing The Board, I was quite pragmatic about the appearance of the app. I used my limited Gimp and Inkscape skills to produce the UI theme images and grabbed some free background images from internet. [...]